Invasion!

Keith Giffen, Bill Mantlo, Todd McFarlane & others Invasion! (1989)
This was one of those massive crossover jobs which comic book publishers tend to impose on their respective casts of characters to an approximately yearly schedule, or at least they did. Perhaps wary of playing the alternative universe card every single fucking time - although if that was ever a concern it's presumably since gone flying out the window - DC here fell back on the traditional alien invasion narrative just like mother used to make, complete with Dominators, a race bearing coincidental but nevertheless effectively malevolent resemblance to the yellow perils of less enlightened times. The idea is that the Green Lantern Corps, guardians of the DC galaxy, have been nobbled by some means or other leaving the field open for an alliance of extraterrestrial bad guys to step in with a final solution to the superhero problem. Earth is an unusually fertile source of superheroes, you see, and those caped guys are forever foiling the plans of various alien warmongers. Invasion! actually does quite a nice job of accounting for why so many superheroes are from Earth, and even why an explosion in a laboratory isn't always a bad thing - probably because playing the mutant card would have seemed a bit obvious, not to mention lacking in originality.

Invasion! is therefore about as good as you will expect it to be, depending on what you've taken from the above. As with caped fare in general, there's the usual level of cheese and implausibility; but if you can work through the pain, it's surprisingly satisfying - and entertaining, and well stocked with big ideas, albeit big slightly silly ideas. It was the Independence Day of comic books, I guess, and similarly reliant on sheer scale more than it was on individual stories - as epitomised by panels of massed superheroes flying at vast spaceships, their numbers so great as to necessitate them being drawn as a huge cosmic asparagus spear in which one can faintly pick out the shapes of tiny capes. Most of the art is handled by Todd McFarlane, and while he's no Jack Kirby and his Superman is a bit too much in the direction of Basil Wolverton, he communicates sheer scale very well, so the first two issues are actually a hoot - although you should probably keep in mind that I enjoyed Independence Day.

Unfortunately the war is won by the end of the second issue, leaving the finale to focus on the human tragedy of the aftermath which is all a bit ham-fisted. Scott from the Doom Patrol pegs it as a gratuitous result of the Dominators' gene bomb, saving Grant Morrison from having to include him in his post-dadaist revision of the team chronicles; as do some other generally unpopular characters whose names I've forgotten and may not have known in the first place. Portentous vows are made at various funerals, boo hoo, and so on and so forth. It feels like an afterthought and seems disproportionately extended, presumably because it would have seemed weird had issue three dropped from eighty pages to the fifteen which were probably all it needed.

The US military was gearing up for all manner of foreign soil japes back in 1989, notably the invasion of Panama with one eye on whatever seemed to be kicking off in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and so on; and Invasion! accordingly feels somewhat like an unreconstructed appeal to the sort of patriotism which might facilitate such things, amounting to a massive three issue grunt of sometimes you just gotta do the right thing, and without too much of that pesky liberal stuff getting in the way. This doesn't make it a bad comic so much as an unintentionally amusing one, at least with the benefit of hindsight, and it at least remains a refreshing change from alternative universes killed off in a narrative following the logic of a William Burroughs novel with less emphasis on men's bottoms; which doesn't necessarily make it a good comic either, but I've read much, much worse.

Deathlok the Demolisher

Rich Buckler, Doug Moench & others Deathlok the Demolisher (1976)
Excluding English black and white reprints, the first American comics I can recall are Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, and the first issue of Phoenix from the short lived Atlas Comics, dating respectively from November 1973, May 1976, and January 1975. These turned up at some sort of jumble sale held at my school, Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants, possibly on more than one occasion. I seem to recall the two Marvel comics being found together, but I'm not sure about Phoenix. Anyway, they were in colour with stories of filmic aspiration spread across a much higher page count than that to which I was accustomed. As science-fiction, they made The Whizzers from Space in the Topper seem slightly ridiculous. They made a huge impression.

Deathlok was a cyborg, and a surprisingly gruesome creation for Marvel, but this was the seventies and America was still trying to process the Vietnam war and the rise of its own counterculture; so Deathlok is a much darker spin on square-jawed Steve Austin. It wasn't quite a case of rebuilding him - seeing as he was actually killed and was therefore a stiff, but they augmented him with robotic parts, put a computer in his head, and reanimated the dead bits with preservative in the hope of slowing his deterioration. Most depressing of all is that having been revived, the computer prevents him from killing himself, leaving him no choice but to serve as a programmable assassin. You can see how it might have left him feeling a bit grumpy.

Deathlok the Demolisher was set in a post-apocalyptic America and is therefore approximately a mash-up of Shelley's Frankenstein, I Am Legend and its big screen reincarnation as The Omega Man, plus a whole load of countercultural ill-will. We're at some distance from truth, justice and the American way.

Deathlok is the warrior let down by his country, the soldier who becomes aware of his own place within an industrial process, and the parallels with those returned or otherwise from the Vietnam war are difficult to miss.

All the places Janice - my wife - and I went to when I was normal! All of it - gone. The restaurants, theaters, everything that was precious to me - gone.

So, as is probably obvious, the Deathlok of Astonishing Tales was one of those strips pitched beyond the traditional Marvel audience, more in the direction of your older brother with his prog rock albums and Farrah Fawcett posters. It was ponderous, vaguely cerebral, and not afraid to unsettle its readership - maybe not Crime and Punishment but certainly a few stages on from Superman's brightly coloured adventures; and most notably, much of issue #35 occurs within a computer generated reality - possibly not quite the first but substantially predating the popularisation of cyberspace by William Gibson and others, and even predating Tom Baker pottering around within the matrix in The Deadly Assassin later that same year.

The only problem with this version of Deathlok is that he exists mainly for the sake of his post-apocalyptic environment and what it said about the present, as was, so he doesn't actually have much to do beyond a series of ambiguous missions, betrayals, and ensuing pontification. Buckler, Moench and others seemingly realised this and tried to jazz the story up with increasingly implausible twists, but only end up muddling things. Deathlok the Demolisher only ever needed to be a hero journey, or rather an antihero journey, in the same way that Heart of Darkness is about the progress more than the destination. Instead we find Deathlok restored to full humanity in a clone of his original body, except the cyborg body remains sentient so that now we have two of them. Then some minor point of continuity demands that this cyborg is only a copy of Deathlok, who has actually been elsewhere all along, following up some mission or other.

They should have quit while they were ahead but inevitably they didn't, so Deathlok returns a couple of years later to have adventures with Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, which works about as well as would Frank Miller's Dark Knight travelling back in time to hang out with sixties telly Batman. To paraphrase Hank Hill, you're not making Spiderman better, you're just making Deathlok worse. There were ten good issues before it all turned to shit and contradiction, but those issues were mostly amazing, Keith Pollard notwithstanding, and arguably unlike anything Marvel published before or since. Sometimes, no matter how good your intention, you just can't bring them back.

Micronauts

Steve Lyons Micronauts (2002)
I find it kind of depressing that for all the hypothetically good work I've undertaken in the expansion of my own literary horizons, reading Rabelais and Cervantes and Plato and all of those guys as signified by my intermittent sneering along the lines of this or that novel being significantly less sophisticated than the writings of Schopenhauer - despite that I've never actually read the writings of Schopenhauer; for all of this, all it apparently takes is for someone to write a novel about some toy I had as a kid, and I may as well be drooling in line for One Direction tickets.

As a rule I try to avoid tie-in novels on the grounds that they're probably mostly crap, and no-one has yet given me sufficient reason to care about whether or not this is an unnecessarily dismissive position to take. I've done my time. I read four-million Doctor Who novels, and there were a handful I might conceivably read again at some point; but on principal I would prefer to avoid any book that wishes it were a television show, a film, or - God forbid - a fucking console game. Whilst this may seem an unforgivably high-handed attitude, considering all the millions upon millions of books out there which you've never read, and may never find time to read even if you live to be two-hundred, why settle for something which secretly wishes it had been made in another medium? If you don't really enjoy books as books - I dunno - why bother reading at all? Just watch the fucking telly instead. Do what you like.

Nevertheless, here I am because I loved the absolute shit out of my Micronaut action figures and related toys when I was a kid, and because this was written by Steve Lyons. I seems to recall Steve Lyons having chugged out a couple of the better Doctor Who novels - at least amongst the aforementioned few I would consider re-reading at some point - as well as a couple of reasonably side-splitting volumes of something called The Completely Useless Encyclopedia. Sadly, lifting up the internet and having a look inside I notice Lyons has also written Sapphire & Steel audio dramas and novels based on something called Warhammer 40,000, which I assume to be one of those children's computer games, but never mind. Given that my previous review was of a Superman comic, I'm probably in no position to start getting sniffy on the grounds of Micronauts being a lesser work than Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.

Mego's Micronaut toys were originally fictionalised as stars of their own Marvel comic by Bill Mantlo and Michael Golden, and spectacularly so until Michael Golden stopped turning up and the title went somewhat down the toilet. Then someone revived the comic in 2002, or maybe before, probably with everyone drawn looking as though they need to take a shit and with at least one major character raped in him batty by his own dad in issue two, but I never saw the revived version; and then there was this, the first of a trilogy of novels.

The story carries some resemblance to that which appeared in the original Marvel run - specifically some teenager with a scientist father discovering a rift in the fabric of reality through which tiny Micronauts spew forth, followed by generic adventures of the kind involving rebel leaders and evil emperors. This version of the tale has the diminutive explorers from another universe arriving in the town of Angel's Gift, which capitalises on their tourist potential by featuring them as both carnival attraction and inspiration for a series of action figures. This goes some way towards smoothing over the discomfort of anyone who, like myself, feels a little self-conscious as a fully grown man reading a novel about toys I played with as a kid; some way, but maybe not all of the way.

'How? There'll be guards on the door—both sides!'

'The same way I got in here. The obvious way.' I look at him blankly, until he grins and says: 'Don't you have any story books on your world? In the fiction of my galaxy, buildings like this always, always have handy air-conditioning ducts!'

Oh yes. Here we are running down a corridor as though we were on some shit TV show whilst drawing attention to the fact of our running down a corridor. Ha ha.

You see, comedic asides pointing out clichés work better when the narrative doesn't keep on committing said clichés over and over, because this reduces the asides to an excuse for not bothering to tell a proper story.

The Harriers catch me, and I look up into Nova's face as she moves in, her energy wings flaring behind her. I haven't seen her up close before, and I'm surprised at how young she looks. Young and beautiful. Her eyebrows arc gracefully beneath her sprouting purple hair, and her slender nose has an attractive curve—but her eyes are cold, and a cruel sneer twists her pursed lips.

As opposed to an amiable or kindly sneer, I suppose, and young and beautiful is not in itself sufficient for a fucking sentence. I really wish people would stop doing that, splattering around fullstops regardless of syntax in the belief that the resulting pause - which would work just as well with an altogether more grammatical comma - gives whatever is said the gravity of an Orson Welles voice-over, when it actually furthers the impression that the author would rather be writing something other than a novel.

Ice cream fandango. Typewriter summer's day Charlie. Bob. Stegosaurus on heat. And Bob again.

Those aren't fucking sentences either.

To be fair, aside from all of the above, Steve Lyons does a decent job, such as it is. The story is told as a reasonably engaging first person present tense narrative, and there's plenty of evidence of Lyon's ability to hold a sentence together, and to write something which at least does more than simply help you to imagine what it would look like if it were on the telly. The problem is that Lyons' telling seems to be significantly superior to that which is told, which is roughly the usual story of a plucky teenager and tiny aliens running along corridors, and with the local mayor's greed drawing them all into a war which no-one can win, and no amount of references to it all feeling a bit like an episode of Quantum Leap can save the turd from toiletdom. This one really feels like a decent writer struggling to make good with a story he's been given by a committee.

Some of the background material is drawn from earlier comic book incarnations, which is in some way unfortunate because it means I had no idea who Azura Nova is supposed to be, and because it doesn't actually compare that well to the Mantlo and Golden version in which the bulk of clichés seemed better concealed and which was simply a more interesting tale, focussing as it did on the Micronauts and their universe rather than a generically plucky teenager who wishes his dad was less of a dick.

Yeah - I know, the Micronauts novel was probably aimed at teenagers or at least at the emotionally and developmentally teenage, but I still say it could have aimed just a little higher; and being as it didn't, it hasn't inspired me with any interest in reading the second or third part of the trilogy.